A wonderfully weird and comedic love letter to H.P. Lovecraft, Call Girl of Cthulhu is the latest from the director Chris LaMartina, the filmmaker behind last year’s endlessly charming 80’s throwback project, the WNUF Halloween Special. This time, LaMartina and his co-writer Jimmy George tackle modern relationships and Cthulhu mythologies, resulting in truly one of the more insanely fun and well-conceived low-budget horror movies I’ve seen all year.
Call Girl of Cthulhu follows nice guy Carter Wilcox (David Phillip Carollo), a young artist desperate to lose his virginity and even more desperate to find the perfect girl to lose it to. Carter thinks he finally has found “the one” when he meets a local call girl Riley (Melissa O’Brien), who frequents the apartment building he lives in with his cranky roommate (Nicolette Le Faye). Unfortunately for Carter (and his intended), Riley has been targeted by a group of cultists as their “chosen one” to give birth to the spawn of Cthulhu, throwing a huge monkey wrench in their blossoming romance of course. Soon, it’s up to Carter to save Riley from her destiny- not only for her own well-being, but also for the sake of all of humanity (and well- Carter’s virginity, too).
As you may have suspected, Call Girl of Cthulhu isn’t a movie that ever takes itself too seriously, an approach that compliments LaMartina and George’s surprisingly clever and thoughtful script rather well. It also doesn’t take a genius to figure out after watching either this film or WNUF that both writers are HUGE genre fans and that love shines through and through with all the little touches they put into the story once again. Call Girl of Cthulhu features numerous homages to Lovecraftian characters and the Cthulhu mythos (as expected), as well as tons of impressive gooey gore moments that rival many practical effects gags you see in movies with 10 times the budget that LaMartina has at his disposal here.
LaMartina and George also balanced out their often silly story with well-developed characters that give you a reason to care about what happens, something else you don’t often see in too many micro-budgeted horror movies these days. The Call Girl of Cthulhu cast, all newcomers to the industry, do really strong work in the film too. Each actor does a nice job of playing up the humor in the material without ever getting too hammy, yet another touch that further strengthened the film overall.
Probably the best film Troma never made, Call Girl of Cthulhu is just good, old-fashioned splat-stick shenanigans and is absolutely worth checking out if it happens to be playing in your area (the film is currently making the festival rounds). It’s not a film meant for everyone, but for those of you Lovecraft (and horror) fans out there looking for something just a little bit outside the norm, Call of Cthulhu is just a ridiculous amount of fun and has the earmarkings of a midnight movie in the making.
Movie Score: 3.5/5
Heather A. Wixson was born and raised in the Chicago suburbs, until she followed her dreams and moved to Los Angeles in 2009. A 14-year veteran in the world of horror entertainment journalism, Wixson fell in love with genre films at a very early age, and has spent more than a decade as a writer and supporter of preserving the history of horror and science fiction cinema. Throughout her career, Wixson has contributed to several notable websites, including Fangoria, Dread Central, Terror Tube, and FEARnet, and she currently serves as the Managing Editor for Daily Dead, which has been her home since 2013. She's also written for both Fangoria Magazine & ReMind Magazine, and her latest book project, Monsters, Makeup & Effects: Volume One will be released on October 20, 2021.
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